thought provoking
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which there is little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which they can develop and pursue their interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.substack.com
Astronaut Scott Kelly on intelligence:
“The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.”
We think we want things, but every desire points to a way of life, a kind of person we long to become. Objects seduce us not with their utility but with their promise of transcendence—status, attention, belonging.
This is a fairly common practice, crafting a ritual where you sit down at the same time every day, in the same chair, writing in the same kind of notebook, creating a repetitiveness that borders on self-hypnosis. This is what Hemingway did, it is what Mario Vargas Llosa does. substack.com
American psychiatrist Glen O. Gabbard has suggested that Freud's narcissism of small differences provides a framework to understand that in a loving relationship, there can be a need to find, and even exaggerate, differences in order to preserve a feeling of separateness and self. wikipedia